i wish i had a bunch of amazing photos to post, but i don't. yesterday, i met up with 2 of the guys who shared the cost of the freight container from los angeles, california (there are a total of 5 motos and one SUV - we all hooked up through ADVrider). these good fellows are buddies and both recently retired. also first-timers in ameríca del sur. they are headed north to catch the last few legs of the dakar rally before it finishes here in santiago. sounds tempting, especially now that i unfortunately hear our bikes won't likely clear chilean customs until january 17&#8230; hmmmm&#8230; dakar?

today, i just wandered around on foot all day. so much for a "ride report" - this is a foot report. my plan was to go to the top of the cerro san cristobal, a big hill downtown, to get some shots of the city. the front desk guy at my building said it would be very busy, and the smog would kill the view. anyway, this set off the "tourists alert" region of my hippocampus, which i believe has been medically identified recently. so, instead, here is a lovely picture of the city from google (in the winter, i assume). maybe i'll break down and get my own shot eventually, but i don't want to keep anyone waiting due to my laziness or phobias.

so instead, i met up with a fellow ADVrider, crested butte-rtw, after he informed me he was in town and graciously agreed to meet up for&#8230; you guessed it&#8230; more beers. here's his blogspot page and his website: www.wheresfletch.com. great guy and an inspiring traveler.

fletch has been riding for over a year, all the way down the americas from colorado. he likes to linger in places and rest his buns like i do, so we are going to sit down with my maps before i head to the coast so that he can lay some good road/places tips on me. we felt like long lost brothers with our baldness. too bad i shaved my beard last week before i left. i was worried about it getting all gummed up with pisco sours, the continentally favored adult beverage.

we met up in the bellavista neighborhood, which is known as the bohemian/tourist hang out. it was fine and pretty relaxed on a monday afternoon.

i went out for dinner like the locals do, at 10pm. i found a nice little courtyard full of people. and found a spot in the corner. the sushi place was good, though i don't recall the name. had a couple of labored conversations with some people in spanish to get some tips for my remaining days. going out alone is an exercise in confidence building. not a lot of 6' 4" bald dudes wandering around santiago, so it's pretty clear who's a gringo and who's not. people stare, which i am getting used to. once i get a bit more comfortable, and my spanish legs under me, i should be able to turn that into an asset.

i've been struggling with the tedium of posting mirrored reports from ADV/HUBB over to Blogger/Blogspot - which i decided after some research was the easiest place to do a stand-alone blog. as many of you know, ADV to HUBB is easy - just copy and paste the "code" from the edit/compose page and plop it in the other edit/compose page. but this was not working from ADV/HUBB to Blogger/Blogspot. the html code was scrambling, the photo/video links were breaking, and i was a general pain in the ass.

(incidentally, i use Flickr to host my photos, and YouTube to host my videos. it's been working great. Flickr does charge $25.00/year to host any photo count over 200, so be aware you are locking yourself into that.)

i was talking about this annoyance with fletch, crested butte-rtw (ADV), and he figured out a solution by accident in the last year of his blogging. he is now my hero, because he has saved me and possibly many more who read this, the pain of re-doing every ADV/HUBB entry on Blogger/Blogspot. thank you fletch.

so it's actually really simple. too simple:

1. after you publish your entry on ADV or HUBB, just select and (copy) the text and photos from the actual public view page:

2. then, in your Blogger/Blogspot edit/compose page, just freaking paste it in there.

3. if you use the Asylum 2.0 page layout (the black one) like i do on ADV, it will make the text white and the background black when you paste into Blogger/Blogspot. to correct this, simply select the entire post in Blogger/Blogspot and use the text and background menu drop-downs to change the background to white, and the text to black.

your last post got me thinking........I tried to copy paste from my blog on Wordpress to ADV, but the pics were just massive and wouldn't work. So......................I guess I should try from ADV to Wordpress, hopefully that will work. Am enjoying your RR and looking forward to more!

i was talking about this annoyance with fletch, crested butte-rtw (ADV), and he figured out a solution by accident in the last year of his blogging. he is now my hero, because he has saved me and possibly many more who read this, the pain of re-doing every ADV/HUBB entry on Blogger/Blogspot. thank you fletch.

everyone who has been struggling with this like i have, owes fletch a beer.

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Thanks for the Shout out brother!!

Awesome meeting up with you yesterday!! See you Thursday for Cerviche and Beers!!
Laters Fletch

Wow, believe me I lived since I born 15 years of my life in Santiago, plus thousand of visits after that. Never ever saw the Andes with snow in December-January.
It is unique and no doubt, the effect of global warming but opposite way.

As for the tall building , it will be called 'Sanhattan', the tallest building in South America in a country where a couple of years ago had the hardest earthquake in history after Japan ( 8.5 )

Wow, believe me I lived since I born 15 years of my life in Santiago, plus thousand of visits after that. Never ever saw the Andes with snow in December-January.
It is unique and no doubt, the effect of global warming but opposite way.

As for the tall building , it will be called 'Sanhattan', the tallest building in South America in a country where a couple of years ago had the hardest earthquake in history after Japan ( 8.5 )

Click to expand...

Just cannot be possible. Is that photo from the new tower 'Sanhattan' from another photo? Santiago had 30 degrees celcius the whole month !! Either May or September could be.
Actually the trees are shown brown, so it can not be summer. One photo has the big poster on all sides , the other not.
The shot from below is the real one where the curtain glass wall is almost to the top.

the beautiful thing about the adventure motorcycling community, is that wherever you go, you have family. i invited one of my container-mates, "bear," to stay with me in santiago. i knew he has rushed together this trip. he had a weekend to prepare everything, whereas i had a year. turns out that we are the same age more or less, and that he is the engineer responsible for the focus mechanism of the camera on the james web space telescope. if you are a astronomy nerd like i am, then you will know that this is a big deal. i cried during the hubble imax movie, because the beauty of what was accomplished with that device overwhelmed me. the james webb is the next generation scope after the hubble, with many many times the resolution. it launches somewhere around 2018, i believe.

so in addition to having the coolest job ever, bear happens also he's a great guy and we've been having an amazing time exploring chile together. of course there have been the expected pitchers of cristal beer to have conversations about the effects of traveling on the soul and mind. there is so much to absorb, so many new things to see everyday, that time effectively slows down. i've not even been here for a week and it easily feels like twice that.

visually, it's overwhelming. he and i have both noticed that when we shut our eyes for naps, in the blackness, there are images, almost like hallucinations, in black and white - images of people and places we've seen, people we've met. very intense and hard to describe. mentally, we are both pushed to our limits. we could admittedly use more sleep, but just processing everyday things is challenging.

we only had a couple of days to explore santiago together. near plaza de armas, in santiago, we when to a famous 100 year old bar called la piojera - which translates to the "louse pit". it was a real stick to the floor kind of place, with some real characters. felt like the bar in that scene in the movie airplane, where the girl scouts are in a fist fight, and the old man gets stabbed on the dance floor. they serve a drink there called a terremoto (earthquake), that is a base of grappa wine with ice cream and fernet. it was disgusting, and very powerful. i can see why they need the sign that you see behind the bar.

friday morning, we took the santiago metro to the outskirts of town, to the pajaritos bus station to catch a ride to valparaiso. we have a meeting with our group's customs agent on monday, but we wanted to spend the weekend at the beach anyway.

valparaiso, and it's sister cities to the north (vina del mar, playa renaca, playa concón) are were santiaguinos go during these high summer months to relax and party. i also here that lots of argentinians come here, because it's cheaper than the beaches of brazil. we stayed the first night at an over-priced shit-hole in vina del mar, but are moving today to downtown valparaiso, which is where you want to be. "valpo" as it is called, is a UNESCO world heritage site. looking forward to getting some photos and posted a report.

my new plan is to joint bear for the last two stages of the DAKAR rally, that are working their way down toward valpo, before they turn inland to finish in santiago on january 20. getting pretty excited about that. i should be reunited with my bike on tuesday or wednesday and actually be able to start riding.

well, the apartment i found in vina del mar was a piece of shit. it looked great in the photos online. this seems to be how things go here. it was however a place to land in a new city. and that was it's most important function that no amount of structural neglect or misleading photography could take away.

bear and i were eager to check out the vibrant character of valparaiso itself (10 minute taxi ride to the south from vina del mar), so we found a hostel on hostelworld.com, and found a place. the neighborhood, cerro carcél (carcél hill) is a bit rough - lot's of stray dogs, not very clean streets. but the hostel - hostel verde limon - is very clean and there's a relaxed vibe and the travelers staying here from all over the world have been very friendly. the building is a crazy maze - like they combined 3 old buildings to make one. this tall gringo is doing a lot of ducking and stooping.

"valpo", as valparaiso is known, it a pretty interesting place. probably not for the faint of heart at times. it's disorderly, lots of odd streets curving around endlessly up the hills. the graffiti is amazing - it's everywhere and it's beautiful and surreal.

bear and i met some chileans in santiago, and we met up with them out here on the coast. together we explored another hill next to ours, cerro concepcion. this hill is nicer, with restaurants, quaint little B&Bs, and a few more tourists. had a dinner there on a place overlooking the bay that was quite tasty.

we also ended up hitching a ride from valpo, back through vina del mar, and finally arriving at playa renaca. there was a lot of traffic, like any beach community in the heart of summer. but the drive was nice to put the whole region in perspective. playa renaca was a bit more of a young, party-your-ass-off kind of vibe. my arms were completely fried from the intense sun here, so i was in no mood for partying. more in the mood for sleeping and aloe vera.

bear and i were speaking spanish with our guides from santiago the entire weekend, and both our brains are very tired with processing language. the spanish is coming along. i still try to start off any conversation with "desculpe, you estoy apprendiendo espanol - por favor, puede hablar lentamente." (sorry, i am learning spanish - please, can you speak slowly.) it works, as people tend to slow down, enunciate, and leave out all the slang or sayings that my brain can't yet understand.

today, monday, we spent the entire day at the customs office. the process was less than efficient, however, chile itself seems to work. much is lost in translation. the customs office is right at the port, and we saw the actual boat (pictured) with our container being unloaded. we compared the boat's number to the one on our bill of lading, the document used to show what we are shipping and prove that it is ours. the entire process of export/import was obscure to me when i started this process. now it is semi-opaque.

we are told that on wednesday, we will be assigned a meeting time with a chilean customs agent, who will go with us to our container, have the shipping company unlock it as we all watch, and do an inspection of our bikes on the spot and hopefully release them to us.

i learned this dicho (saying) today: "ayer, lo passe chancho," which means "yesterday, i had a piggy day." this is a saying specific to chile, in spanish. chileans also say to their boyfriends/girlfriends, "hola chanchito," meaning "hello piggy." having a piggy day means that you are with your friends or doing fun stuff, and making memories. i have been having a piggy week and a half.

valparaiso after 3 days of inhabitance is growing on me and feels familiar. i'm already thinking and dreaming in spanish. we've moved from the hostal verde limon to the hostal caracol. hostal caracol was close by, and have a gated back yard where we can put our bikes (which we collected today! - more about that soon.)

wednesday, we took a walking tour with a guy named francisco, a porteño (person from valparaiso - a port person) who gives walking tours of valpo for tips. it was a 3 hour tour rich with history, politics, graffiti, humor and this is also where i learned about piggy days.

there was a golden age in valparaiso that was set off by the san francisco gold rush, strangely enough. the demand of wheat from chile to fuel the california gold rush built a world class city. it's rise to opulence was fast, with certain areas of downtown claiming status as some of the wealthiest areas on the continent at the time. the downfall was similarly to the point, brought about by the construction of the panama canal, causing activity at the valpo port to dry up and leading to a generalized depression that has lasted until today. valpo is now the most poverty stricken city in chile, but i don't seem to mind.

so, today was a BIG DAY. after a year of planning this trip, months of spending too much money on motorcycle stuff, and a month of waiting for my bike to sail to valpo, today i was reunited with my bike. the gringo parade met up at a really amazing seafood restaurant, los porteños II, very close to the aduanas (customs) building downtown. all of us where there, including "coach" who dragged my bike from salem, oregon to put my bike on the container for me in los angeles, california.

after lunch (i had the paella, which had about 5 pounds of chicken, pork, seafood, and curried rice), we all went to the SAMM container handling facility to crack open our officially sealed container. (the seal was an aluminum band on the lock that could have been broken by a cat or a ferret. but it was in tact and hence we knew our bikes were un-tampered-with.

jorge, our chilean customs 'fixer' was amazing and calmly worked through the mountain of paperwork. eventually, after we cracked the container, pulled all our bikes (and an SUV) out of the container, the customs agent came and looked over the bikes. there really was not search, but he checked the VIN numbers and we had a few laughs about my rubber duck. the customs agent has a BMW 1200GS, so you could say he was sympathetic to our cause. chancho!!

finally, after some more stamps and papers, we rode the F out of there and bear and i went up to our new hostel on a steeper hill than before. (valpo is very much like san francisco, without the hippies.) we rode up a back alley and into a gated backyard of the hostel. i pull my panniers off to make the bike lighter, as we had to hop a descent sized curb and the turning radius to get in the gate was crapola. managed to get both bikes in without a spill.

i admired how well i packed the bike, but she's definately porky. i'll be sending back some stuff in the mail when i get to brazil. now, after going down the hill to get dinner (always a 3000 calorie burning endeavor), i'm again staying up way to late for your benefit, processing photos, uploading to flickr, updating 3 blogs.

Happy that everything went well and according to schedule. Except for the Port of Los Angeles strike, that ruined our previous vessel.
At least everybody ate and drank well ending with a content belly taking a piece of our historic Valparaiso city port , "Patrimony for the Humanity" (I would say a sacred city for the world).

Photos are at his best. And as an architect I really appreciate those murals but frankly, there is so much urban value in that port that I would heavily invest to bump Valparaiso as one of the jewels of the pacific. Thinking that, was for long time even more important than San Francisco.
From Thomas Cook, Darwin, many pirates too , put their feet on that port city.

One of the good things about these shippings is , that the groups always get together and a high camaraderie mood.
I love this kind of things and make me proud , mainly because I make good friends too around the world. It is like sending an expedition and seeing truly human kindness.

Good luck to all and we'll wait for you in March/April . Now is time to get 8 of others out of Valparaiso to Vancouver.

it's time to begin the ride indeed. i'm in playa renaca, where bear and i decided to come for a change from valpo. staying right in the center of the little downtown at piero's hotel. althought expensive, 114.00 USD night, it is the only thing we could find and frankly, the best deal we could find. this town is packed with chilean and argentinian summer tourists. the hotel has a pool, and i spent about an hour baking the other white parts of my body to match the charred sections. the sun down here will cook a northwestern boy to a crisp in an hour. i feel like i'm evenly baked now.

the bike is porky, over-loaded with too much stuff. i knew this heading out, but it's each adv riders responsibility to pack too much shit, and then give it away to less fortunate people on the road. so that is what i will do. i'm carrying a spare front and rear tire until mendoza, argentina, which i will leave at a motorcycle shop. the rest of the fat, i will cut over the next week and either ditch, or mail home from buenos aires. i should be in b.a. in about 4 days.

bear, i haven't told you my decision yet, but it's time to start my solo journey as i saw it in my head starting out. it's hard, because i made a good friend, and i don't want to part ways. we've had a ton of fun exploring together, and the bond that we've made is a lifetime bond.... wuppp... he just walked into the room and the gig is up. i told him. ok. he understands. ok. done deal. well shit...

so that is the way of the road. we'll ride together again - not sure when, but eventually.

tomorrow, i will make for the hotel portillo, just to the west of the switchbacks that make up the chilean side of the paso de jama. the hotel was recommended by the guy at the hostal caracol. the pass cuts just south of aconcagua, the highest peak in the andes, and the americas, at 22,837 ft. (gulp). that is a high *%#&*!'ing mountain. i will ride up some very intense switchbacks on the chilean side that i hear put the fear of jebus in you.

i'm looking forward to some time alone to process what the hell it is that i am doing and have done. i envisioned this, but it seems rather surreal that it's actually happening. for now, i can't post any images now because i need to sort out the route for tomorrow, reserve the hotel, figure out where i'm dumping my spare tires in mendoza, etc. later.

i lied. i was all set and ready to go this morning, heading to mendoza, argentina and got held up trying to reprogram my bikes computer to metric/kilometers instead of english/miles. i went back into the room for a pit stop, and bear had found out that there was a Dakar spectator zone right on my route to mendoza between the cities of villa alemana and limache. previously, i thought i'd have to trek way north to catch it, so now i'm back on the dakar path.

we spent the day scoping out the areas that it is traveling through. there are supposed to be 10,000 spectators spread over the course for the day. the dakar "mass" basically rolls in and out of small towns, draining them of resources: water, gas, food, lodging. so we are prepped with food, water, spare fuel and posting to the adv motorcycle forums to find the coordinates of the spectator zones. the racers are supposed to be blasting through early in the morning tomorrow around 7 or 8am.

we basically made a big hundred mile loop and wound up in vina del mar at a new hostel, hungry for internet connections to figure out where to go and what to do. earlier today, we were at a hiper lider (south american name for super walmart) looking for internet, and while i was in checking on that, some guy came up to bear and told him that he and 30 other bikers would meet us back there tomorrow morning to lead us out to the spectator zone. that works too!

today was frustrating for us both, driving in a big circle, ending up back at the beach where we've already been. but it yielded that rider connection, so if they show up, we are set. i'm still posting to forums for the actual coordinates as a backup.

i'll probably watch the races until noon, then take off for the portilla hotel that i was supposed to arrive at tonight. one day burned to see the dakar rally: worth it.